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If Rejection Makes You Quit, Good.

Back in 1994, when I was first starting my humor writing career, I had been included on a guy’s website that listed funny writers on the Internet. A few months later, when I was checking the site again, he had removed me from his list.

When I emailed him about it, he replied, “Because I don’t think you’re that funny.”

My first reaction was “well, f*** you!” But I didn’t say that. I said it a lot to the computer, and vented to another humor writer about it, but I didn’t tell him what a little twit he was. I swore I would “show that humorless little bastard who’s funny,” vowing to become the funniest newspaper humor columnist this side of Dave Barry.

Then I did something even better. I outlasted the guy. I worked and honed my writing and my humor year after year. The humorless guy killed his page after about 12 months, and was never heard from again.

But it did hurt my feelings. It made me feel like I wasn’t very good at what I loved to do. But the one thing I never did was quit. I never stopped writing humor. (Mostly because I was so full of myself, I believed the guy was an idiot, and that I was better than he thought. So quitting never actually occurred to me.)

But regardless, that’s the pivotal event that every artist faces: the successful ones keep going, the wanna-bes and poseurs quit and go through the motions.
 

Rejection Does Not Mean the End

I hate watching American Idol and X Factor because so many people see their rejection as the end of their career, sobbing that this was their one and only chance at stardom.

How asinine are these people? If they were true artists, trying out for a TV show would be just one rejection of many on the road to success. The true artist would shrug his shoulders and say, “Oh well. I’ve got an audition at Cadillac Ranch I have to get to.” But these morons sob like it’s the end of the world and they give up on a dream that was nothing more than a flight of fancy.

That’s how you can tell the difference between a real artist and a poseur. The real artist does their art every day. The poseur waits for inspiration, which comes every few days, but only if they have time for it.

The poseur has plenty of time to stew over the sting of this new rejection; the real artist barely has time to think about their successes, let alone being passed over by the mouth-breathers who wouldn’t know real talent if it kicked them in the ass. (Not that I’m bitter or anything.)
 

That Which Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger

If you quit your art because someone didn’t like what you did, you weren’t that serious about it in the first place.

There are plenty of people who quit pursuing what they think is their dream after they receive a couple rejections, believing they’re at the top of their game after a few short months, or even a year or two. They get voted off the show, turned down, or otherwise rejected, and they’re done.

In his book, On Writing, Stephen King tells a story about how impaled every rejection letter he received on a nail. It eventually became so full, and the letters weighed so much, he had to replace it with a railroad spike. This is the guy who has published thousands of novels and a kajillion words. And he was rejected so much that he needed an industrial-sized rejection letter holder.

But he never quit. Never, ever. And now he makes millions of dollars scaring the bejeezus out of millions of people.
 

We Need Rejection to Weed Out the Poseurs

If you really love your art, you won’t let a few haters keep you from it. That’s because it’s a passion, not a daydream. It’s not a whim. It’s not something you do during commercials. It’s what you do instead of everything else, every day.

If you’re easily persuaded to quit, just because someone somewhere didn’t like what you were doing, then quit. Quit now. Quit wasting your time in pursuing something you don’t really love, just because you thought it “sounded neat.” Save the rest us the hassle of climbing over you later.

But if you’re serious about it, you can get discouraged, you can get sad, you can think the other person is a big stinky jerkface. We all have those moments. We all think the people who told us “no” are know-nothing mouth-breathers.

The difference between the serious artist and the poseurs is that we don’t quit when we get rejected. We impale the rejection letter on a spike and start on the next project.

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3 Ways to Write a 30 Minute Blog Post

Want to write a 30 minute blog post, but you’re not a writer? Do you struggle with getting anything written in under an hour? I once knew a PR professional who couldn’t write a press release in less than three hours, yet I wrote the same release in 20 minutes.

Why?

Because most of this stuff, like it or not, is formulaic. Formula doesn’t mean boring or lacking quality. But it does mean following a few of the same steps over and over and over. The end result doesn’t have to be formulaic, but the process does. And if you can get the process down, you can write a blog post in 30 minutes or less.

Here are three ways you can write a 30 minute blog post.

1. Write When You’re Not Writing

Good writers write all the time, but they don’t necessarily do it with a pen in their hand or a laptop under their fingers. You can do write while you’re driving, showering, standing, sitting, commuting, cleaning the house, cooking, or staring out the window. In fact, staring out the window is a great way to write.

This kid is off to a great start as a writer.

The Lance Mannion blog (which is the macho-est dude’s name since Dirk Facepunch) had a great description of what writing is.

“Standing, that’s working. Sitting is working. Pacing is writing. I do my best thinking then. Looking out the window, that’s writing. Brushing your teeth is writing. Anything’s writing,” Rob says. “The hardest writing is showering.”

Just turn off your radio or TV and start writing your next post in your head. I wrote this post while I was driving to lunch today.

2. The List Post

Bloggers everywhere are rolling their eyes at this, but tough shit. List posts are awesome. List posts are easy. And whether you like them or not, list posts bring in readers. (You’re here, aren’t you?)

Chances are, everything you want to say about a particular topic can be summed up in a few key points. After all, we’ve been taught to write and speak with three main points. And we’ve been trained to skim and read in bullet points by USA Today and many magazines (check out Cosmo the next time you’re in the supermarket checkout line). Like I always tell people, “I’ll quit doing list articles the week after Cosmo does.”

So break your post into 3, 5, or even 10 reasons/secrets/tips/tricks. Write them in outline form, and then give a brief explanation of each point, and move on. Later, develop each point into its own blog post and explore the idea more thoroughly.

3. Write an Email to Your Mom

First of all, you have to stop writing for posterity. You have to stop writing as if your blog posts will be pored over in 100 years by scholars as evidence of your great thinking. You have to stop writing as if you’re going to say something profoundly awesome that will change the face of your industry.

(This is also true of people who buy new notebooks, write two pages in them, and then abandon them.)

Instead, write an email to your mom.

We all love our mom, but she never quite gets what we do. She sort of does, especially if you explain it in simple terms without all the jargon and insider knowledge.

So start your blog post with these 10 words: Dear Mom, Let me tell you what I learned today.

Then, explain what you want her to know in language she’ll understand. It’s even better if you can explain why it’s so cool, too. And keep it short — 300 – 350 words — she doesn’t want to be mired in the details. Save that for a future email.

Then, go back and delete that 10 word opening. You’ve got your blog post.

So, there you have it. Three ways you can write a blog post in 30 minutes or less. As long as you keep it short and simple, and use basic language, you should be able to get it done.

 

 
Photo credit: avlxyz (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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My TEDxFortWayne Talk on Community

I was given the chance to give a talk at the first ever TEDxFortWayne event in May 2012, where I talked about how the Internet has given us a chance to do community better than we’ve ever done before.

It was the first year for the TEDxFortWayne event, and I was very proud to be one of their speakers. (It’s still one of my favorite talks.)

When the Internet first started becoming popular, people worried that it would destroy our sense of community. If anything, it’s actually helped us find a better community of people we like and want to get to know.

What those nay-sayers didn’t know is that this has been a continuing complaint about television, radio, air conditioners, cars, and the loss of front porches on our homes.

Instead, think about those weird and esoteric things we love to do (or our kids love to do). When I was a boy, in 1977, my weird thing was beer can collecting. It was only by accident that I discovered there’s a whole community of people who loved collecting beer cans. Now, thanks to the Internet, you can find websites, a national organization, regional groups, and conventions all over the world devoted to this one interest.

There are marble collectors, anime cosplay fans, people who love vintage baseball, punk rock knitters, wood carvers, first edition book collectors, fan fiction story writers, typewriter collectors, and anything else you can think of. The Internet has given us our tribes and brought us together in a way that front porches and neighborhoods ever could.

Watch the TEDxFortWayne video to see why the Internet may be giving us a better community than we’ve ever had before.

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Typing is an Important Writing Skill

I learned something interesting from a musician friend of mine last night. According to Rodney Thomas, a professional musician and my good friend from high school, when he plays piano, for the most part, his left hand runs on auto pilot. He can’t think about his left hand while he concentrates on his right hand. And at times, he has to switch his right hand to auto pilot so he can focus on his left for a few minutes.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. When we’re doing something multi-handed like playing piano or typing, our hands operate differently from each other. Our left hand truly does not know what our right hand is doing. We run on auto pilot for certain things.

Typewriter keys
I learned to type on one of these. Now I want another one.

As a writer, my auto pilot activity is typing.

It sounds weird, but I think good writers are also good typists. We should be writing so much that we don’t think about our typing, we think about the words that are coming out of our brains. The people who can’t type are struggling to write well, because their focus is on their hands and not their words.

For other good writers, they refuse to type anything because they don’t know how, so they write things long hand on legal tablets. They recognize that their typing is going to get in the way of their writing.

I’ve been typing for so long — since Mr. Carey’s Typing 1 class in 1983 — that I am a touch typist. I can turn my head and pay attention to a conversation. I can close my eyes and lean my head back. I can type right-handed while I hold a coffee cup in my left hand. And I have, on more than one occasion, started to fall asleep and continue typing for three or four sentences. It freaks my family out when I do that.

What’s weird is that I have such strong muscle memory for the way certain words are typed that if I misspell something or I transpose two letters, I can tell. My fingers move out of order and I can tell it as soon as I happen. That’s when I turn away from the conversation, or lift my head and open my eyes to fix the error.

As odd as it sounds, a good writing skill to practice is typing. The better you type, the less you have to concentrate on typing. The less you have to concentrate in typing, the more you can concentrate on the words.

So if you can’t type, start focusing on whatever you need to do to be a better typist. As you master that important-but-mindless skill, you’ll be able to focus on your writing.

 
Photo credit: sasa.mutic (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Chiasmus: A Rhetorical Device I Love to Hate, Or Hate to Love

Given how much I love a well-written speech and how much I hate motivational quotes that are plastered all over Facebook and Twitter, I have a love-hate relationship with the chiasmus.

Chiasmus is a rhetorical device where two or more clauses are reversed in a single sentence or paragraph.

  • Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. (John F. Kennedy)
  • But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first. (Matthew 20:16)
  • In the end, it’s not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how many moments took your breath away. (Shing Xiong)
  • Quitters never win, and winners never quit. (Anonymous)
  • “If you do not master your rage—” “What, your rage will become your master?” (Mystery Men)
So? I used to work for the f—ing President. Float that opposite.

It’s a great rhetorical device, because it’s ear-catching, it’s memorable, and it can zap some life into a dull phrase. When it comes from the mouths of master orators, it’s lyrical and moving. When it shows up in my Facebook stream, I want to punch Facebook in the neck, because it’s being used like the star wipe of motivational quotes.

It’s called the chiasmus because of the Greek letter X, or “chi” (like the “kye” in “sky,” not “chee” as in “tai chi”). Basically, the two parts of the statement cross over like the X, which lends itself to the name. Or, as Toby Ziegler mistakenly called it in an episode of West Wing, the “floating opposites.” (When I was a speechwriter, I searched and searched for more information on floating opposites, and the only references I could find at all were to that West Wing episode, which means it’s not a real thing.)

While it can be a powerful device, it’s often greatly overused by the same people who discovered the Drop Shadow filter on Photoshop 10 years ago. And that’s where the use of chiasmus in motivational quotes becomes so annoying.

It’s such an easy device to use that it gets overused. When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. In the hands of some, the chiasmus is just one big claw hammer that is used to pound emotion into every Facebook update this side of “Hang in there, Kitty, Friday’s coming.”

Just remember, if chiasmus is a spice, it’s garlic, not salt. A little garlic goes a lo-o-o-ong way, and should not be sprinkled liberally into every piece you write, let alone every paragraph. Or status update.

Save the chiasmus for a special occasion, when you know it’s going to make a big difference to what you’re writing. Not when you’re exhorting your Facebook friends “You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.” (Bleah!)

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Keep Calling It Social Media ROI: A Response to Copyblogger

I hate it when people try to change the name of a well-known concept, just because they don’t think it accurately describes what that thing is anymore.

Some teeth grindingly well-known examples include:

  • Changing radio theater to audio theater “because you don’t just listen on the radio anymore — CDs, podcasts, and the Internet are also channels.”
  • American Public Radio changing their name to American Public Media for the same reason.
  • Debbie Weil wants to stop calling blogging “blogging,” because the term is outdated. It should be called “the social web” (I heard her say it on Doug Karr’s Marketing Tech Radio show last year).

Trust me, this list goes on and on and on.

Last December, Copyblogger did the same thing. Sean Jackson (CFO of Copyblogger) and Sonia Simone (CMO of Copyblogger) wrote a blog post called There Is No ROI In Social Media Marketing.

But the truth is, marketing will never produce an ROI.

Sonia: OK, you’re still sounding insane to me.

Sean: I’m not done yet.

Marketing will never produce an ROI because ROI is not what you think it is.

A pure definition of ROI is simple to quantify.

ROI = (Gain from the Investment – Cost of Investment)/Cost of the Investment

The problem for marketing professionals is that marketing activity is not an investment.

An investment is an asset that you purchase and place on your Balance Sheet. Like an office building or a computer system. It’s something you could sell later if you didn’t need it any more.

Marketing is an expense, and goes on the Profit & Loss statement.

Yes, this makes sense. But it makes sense in the same way that telling an 8-year-old that eating Brussels sprouts will help him grow up to be big and strong. And on one level, the 8-year-old wants to be big and strong.

On the other hand, it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard, because Brussels sprouts taste like shit.

We Need ROI

Frankly, I don’t care if you don’t think it’s accurate. I don’t care if you think there’s a term that better reflects all the subtle intricacies of whatever it is you’re involved with. I’m not just talking about the difference between investments and profits (that’s more than a little subtle).

I’m talking about the difference between the words you use, and the words everyone else in the world uses.

When I was in crisis communication at the Indiana State Department of Health in 2006-2007, I had to constantly stop the epidemiologists from referring to the bird flu as the “human flu pandemic.” Whenever we had a news interview, I had to remind more than a few of them not to use “human flu pandemic” when they spoke with reporters.

“But ‘bird flu’ isn’t accurate. It may not even come from birds. And it certainly won’t be limited to birds by then.”

“Okay, then call it ‘pan flu,’ because that’s the term the general public is using.”

They didn’t like it, because it wasn’t completely, technically accurate, but I was satisfied because the public was going to know what the hell they were talking about.

We saw it again in 2009, when — turns out the epis were right — it was the swine flu epidemic that got us. And predictably, the media types and general public were all talking about swine flu, swine flu, swine flu. Predictably, the CDC tried talking about the “human flu pandemic,” and no one knew what the hell they were talking about.

Word reached the CDC, and they started talking about H1N1 instead (it helped when the US Swine Association and other hog people told the media that the term “swine flu” was hurting their sales).

It was still accurate, it didn’t offend the epis, and it was still short and sound-bitey enough for the media and public.

What ROI and Swine Flu Have in Common

(Nothing. It was the pithiest sub-head I could think of.)

But at the same time, we do have to recognize that, for good or bad, people will use the term ROI forever. Like Jackson said, “I’m seeing ROI taking on a mythical status in marketing — a benchmark used to compare every decision to some financial metric of return.”

It’s not just marketing people, it’s businesspeople everywhere. We all use the term “ROI,” even if there’s really not an “I” in the first place. Same way KFC is now just “KFC.” It no longer stands for “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” they’re just “KFC.”

I think the term “ROI” is taking on the same meaning. We know it means something, but it doesn’t reflect what the letters stand for anymore.

Now, ROI can refer to investments in capital products, it can refer to marketing campaigns, it can refer to your website, your cell phone, your networking events, or anything you spend money on and hope to make money back.

(Because if you want to get even more technically accurate about it, most capital items don’t have a return; you use them until they wear out. And my personal finance friends remind me that an investment only refers to things that can appreciate in value; so a house is an investment, a car is not. So should we start referring to it as Lack Of Return On Investment, or LOROI? No, because that’s stupid.)

So Should We Change The Term “ROI?”

No, we should not. Because all the variations I hear — Return on ENGAGEMENT, Return on INTERACTION, Return on EFFORT — are about as mentally repulsive as a cold, half-chewed Brussels sprout in an 8-year-old’s mouth.

Just like with blogging, radio theater, and public radio, we need to stick with the term that people know. Rather than taking a prescriptive approach to language (i.e. “we have to follow these rules, because they’re the rules”), and changing the name of something to be as perfectly accurate as possible, instead just chalk it up to “common usage,” or the idea that too many people are doing it this way to change it.

Rather than complaining about the term, why don’t you instead try to get people to understand that social media is 1) measurable, and 2) can make money? That’s the more important battle to fight, rather than the ticky-tack little details that only matter to a select few people in an already tiny niche.

 

 

Jason Falls and I talk extensively about the ROI of social media marketing in our book, No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing (affiliate link).